


Talismans

by tielan



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e10 The Return Part 1, Gen, Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-07
Updated: 2011-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-16 04:18:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Talismans are symbols of connection and reconnection of that which is sacred to us.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Image Memory

“Dr. McKay?”

Rodney didn’t look up from his computer screen. “Hmm?”

There was a pause while the woman waited for him to look up and pay attention to her. Rodney didn’t look away from the file under scrutiny. It was a set of equations that had to be correctly matrixed in order for the power output to work correctly - and by ‘work correctly’, Rodney meant ‘not blow up Area 51 and the surrounding state’. Which was why he wasn’t paying any attention to her. “Yes, Roberta, what is it?”

“Who’s in the photo?”

Photo? What photo?

Rodney turned around, thrown by the introduction of a new train of thought. The assistant - one of the more annoying ones, who always waited for his full and total attention - was looking at the top of Rodney’s filing cabinet.

Six weeks and it was already collecting dust.

It looked like a group of people having a day out at a lake somewhere. A pier that might have been made of wood, some horse play, the smirking grins of the two men wrestling their smaller team-mates into the water.

\--

 _“Ronon, I am never going to help you ever aga--” The sea hit Rodney with enveloping cold. He should have known better than to come down - even for ‘a spot of R &R’ as Cadman put it. Especially when Ronon was feeling mischievous._

 _Teyla was still fighting Sheppard when Rodney came up for air. “Colonel...” Her voice was slightly strained as she spoke._

 _“Teyla...” Sheppard used his weight to gain leverage on their smaller team-mate, pushing her back, but she had her revenge by hooking an arm around his shoulder and hauling him down into the sea with her._

 _Rodney turned his face away, only to gain a wave-full of seawater up his nose and in his mouth as Ronon dive-bombed into the water. “Lovely,” he declared as he spat out the salt._

 _Ronon’s grin was wicked as he tossed back his dreadlocks. “Don’t be a grump, McKay.”_

 _“Yeah, Rodney. Now, isn’t this better than your lab?” Sheppard asked rhetorically._

 _“No!”_

 _Teyla slipped through the water towards Rodney, sleek as a mermaid. “I am glad you came, Rodney.”_

 _“Really?” Rodney nearly choked on a mouthful of water. Teyla was always friendly, but rarely flirtatious, and especially not with Rodney. Maybe this coming out for a break wasn’t so bad after all._

 _“Yes,” Teyla answered, smiling at his surprise._

 _Then she dunked him._

 _When Rodney came up choking and swearing terrible revenge on her, he heard the click of a camera shutter. Cadman smiled beyond the silver box and dark lens as Rodney spluttered._


	2. Inclusive Jewellery

Teyla heard the scrape of metal beads along the edge of the carved wooden box in which she kept her personal things and turned.

“What are these?” Misa asked, curious as the silver chain of the identification tags dripped between her fingers.

“Identifiers,” said Teyla, carefully peeling the tuber roots and reminded of how much she had hated the chores of cooking. Perhaps it was why she had never made Tuttle root stew the way Charin had: her heart was not in the cooking. “The Lantean warriors wear them when they fight. Should they die and their bodies be defaced, they have identifying markings.”

Misa’s brows rose, delicate arches over her tip-tilted eyes. “Defaced?”

Teyla thought of the four bodies, charred husks in the blown-up ruins of P8A-177, with only their tags to identify them - and even those had been disguised: Gennii exchanged for Lantean. “You have seen the Wraith-dead.”

Misa nodded, instantly understanding. The dangling chain glinted in the light that filtered through the thin membrane of the tent. “And these are yours?”

“Yes.” It didn’t have all the information that the Lantean tags did, but then, Teyla wasn’t a Lantean.

\--

 _The wink and glitter of the chain seemed mesmerising in the morning light. Teyla took the offered tags from the Colonel._

 _“After the thing with Lorne and the Gennii, well, we thought that you should probably have a set of your own.” John said, watching her face with the directness that was at once both appealing and disconcerting. “Running around with us, you’re pretty high-profile, and...” He trailed off._

 _“Thank you.” Teyla looped the thin chain around her fingers, and glanced up at him before returning to scrutinise the tags, written in two languages - Earth and the common lettering used for when Athosians wished to write something down. Her name, her people, her ‘blood group’ as the Lanteans defined it, and the words, ‘Stationed in Atlantis.’ In the Athosian lettering, it said, ‘Of the city of the Ancestors.’_

 _The tags John wore were not quite like this - of that, Teyla was sure. “These were specially made,” she observed, looking up at him again._

 _“I put an order in,” John admitted. “Not officially. Back home you can get the blanks and get them individually stamped...” He trailed off._

 _Teyla smiled and slipped the chain over her head, letting the metal warm against her skin. “Thank you.”_

 _John looked like he wanted to smile - the odd expression of ‘not quite’ that sometimes crossed his face for no reason Teyla had ever identified. “It’s a little odd for jewellery, but I hoped you’d like it.”_

 _As they sparred, Teyla spared a portion of her mind to reflect on the gift. The tags meant more than merely a way to identify Teyla’s body should she fall in a fight. Ronon still carried his identification of the Satedan Armed Forces - a reminder of what he’d been and whom he’d fought among._

 _She appreciated what John was saying with the tags. More than he knew._


	3. Personal Rosary

“Nice beads,” noted Nurse Hanover as she sat down opposite him in the SGC commissary with a cup of coffee.

John resisted the urge to stuff them back in his pocket, to hide the short string of beads he’d been staring at for the last few minutes. A clear glass-like bead was followed by four carved ones - wood, bone, glass and stone. “A gift from friends,” he said sitting back in his chair, but leaving the beads out on the table.

“Those natives from Pegasus?”

“Teyla and Ronon, yes.” In the privacy of his mind, John wondered why he kept correcting people. ‘Those natives from Pegasus’ could have described anything he’d encountered in the two years of Atlantis, from the Wraith to the energy beings that had created the impression that they were able to get back to Earth that first year.

Teyla and Ronon were distinct from ‘the Pegasus natives’ in John’s mind. The distinction was important.

John’s fingers trailed over the bead surfaces on the woven leather cord - his skin moving across the now familiar crevices and carvings of his own personal rosary _._

Teyla had handed him the package in the gateroom, a quick movement, almost furtive in the too-public space with everyone watching. John had fingered it as he walked through the Stargate, too-conscious that he was leaving friends - family - behind.

\--

 _“We have few things of the Ancestors left to us,” Teyla said as she served tea outside Charin’s tent on the mainland._

 _“Like the firelighters.”_

 _“The firelighters are our variation of a technology the Ancestors taught us long ago.” Her expression faded a little. “We no longer have that technology, either.”_

 _John pushed the bead-like things around the shallow clay saucer. “So what were these for?”_

 _She put down the teapot and picked out a single bead, clear with two spots at opposite ends of the sphere, one red, one blue. She dropped it in John’s palm, and he studied it in the afternoon light. Tiny silvery swirls glinted through the centre of the clear bead as he tilted it this way and that._

 _“This one keeps a memory of sound,” she said. “You press this four times,” she pointed at the red spot. “It will begin saving the noises around it. You press it four times to stop it. If you wish to listen to what it has heard, then touch the blue point four times.”_

 _“And touch the blue point four times to stop listening?”_

Her lips curved in pleasant warmth. “Yes.”

He touched the red spot four times and held it out to her, meeting her eyes in a challenge. “Say something.”

\--

 _“You carve?” Thinking it over, maybe he shouldn’t have sounded so surprised._

 _“You don’t?”_

 _John shrugged. “Never had the time or patience.”_

 _Ronon bared his teeth in the smile that was more challenge than chummy. “Never had the patience until I was a Runner.”_

 _He wouldn’t have figured Ronon to have a static hobby. Fighting. Running. Wrestling. Teaching. Those were the kinds of activities they expected from the athletic Satedan._

 _John squinted at the lines and shapes Ronon was neatly eking out with his smallest knife - not much longer than John’s finger. “Any specific designs?”_

 _Ronon tossed the half-finished bead at John. “Patterns mostly. Some Satedan shorthands.”_

 _He turned the wood around in his hands - surprisingly delicate work for someone who came across as...unpolished as Ronon. John tossed it back. “Neat.”_

 _The four beads Ronon had given him bore the Satedan shorthands for ‘family’, ‘friend’, ‘leader’, and ‘great’._


	4. Coveted Edge

It was Jinto who noticed the knife one day when Ronon was helping skin a _hireni_.

“That’s an Earth knife, isn’t it?”

Ronon glanced at the young man with surprise. Nobody else had commented on the knife - not even Teyla. “Yeah.”

“From Colonel Sheppard?” There was awe in the pronounced syllables, and Ronon felt a sudden kinship with the young man, for all that the length of Jinto’s life lay between them.

“Yeah. And a bunch of others.” Rodney, the Marines Ronon had trained, even Carson and Elizabeth - it had been a gift of sorts, presented when Ronon went to the gym for the last training session the morning before the Lanteans shipped out of Pegasus.

As Sheppard had said, it really sucked.

“Can I?” Jinto held out a hand.

Ronon hesitated a moment. Then he shrugged and put it into Jinto’s hand, and pulled out another to continue the skinning. It was just a knife. Solid make, sharp edge, like any other knife in his collection.

But he kept an eye on Jinto as the young man slid the steel between flesh and hide with practised care.

They’d given it to him - sheath and belt and everything. And Ronon had been surprised.

\--

 _He’d expected the marines. Not so many of them, though._

 _Rodney was a surprise. Almost as much as the knife Sergeant Hobart presented to him - one of the Earth ones Ronon had admired. He’d considered asking for one of them, but figured that his knives were serviceable and kept sharp._

 _He didn’t need another, even if he coveted the Earth blade._

 _“Don’t lose it. If we come back to find you’ve lost it...well, we’ll think of something. Sheppard will probably short-sheet your bed. Again. And Carson says you’re not to use it to dig any tracking devices out of your back in future - let Teyla do it if you have to.” Rodney paused and seemed to be trying to think of something to say. “Anyway, that’s done. I’m...I’ll be in my lab. Still got packing to do. You’ll be at lunch, right? Sheppard told you?”_

 _The marines looked like they were struggling to hold back grins. Ronon couldn’t help smiling himself. Rodney was a funny guy, even if he didn’t intend it._

 _“Yep.”_

 _“Okay. Right. Good. Well, I’ll see you then.”_

 _Rodney stumped off and Ronon watched him go, and then looked back at the knife._

 _The haft was engraved, a long list of ranks and initials running up one side and down the other - the men he’d trained, and taught while in Atlantis. And, closest to the blade, four sets of initials, no ranks. C.B., E.W., R.M., J.S._

 _There wasn’t much else to say, except, “Thanks.”_

 _The hilt of the knife sat perfectly in his hand, an elegant, deadly weapon._

 

 _Amulets, talismans, and charms abound in the lives of everyone in every time and place._

 _They are physical signs of relationships with people and places and experiences._

 _They are symbols of connection and reconnection, union and reunion with what is sacred to us._

 _~ Robert Fulghum ~_


End file.
